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latraljam Hintoln 

A MEMORIAL 




Y. M. C. A. 

Lincoln was a great leader of 
men and a leader of great men. 

WILLIAM REID CURRAN 







C(\^-j 



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/■♦' 



ililiraijam Hincoln 

A MEMORIAL 




Y. M. C. A. 



la^illiam leicib Curran 






I 




This picture is made from a negative taken from life, by Henry H. 
Cole, in Peoria in 1858. Mr. Cole lost original negative by fire. 
Negative here used is from a photograph taken from a photograph 
printed from lost negative, and reprinted November 27, 1917, at his 
gallery in the City of Pekin, which is the source from which the plate 
is made that prints this picture. Mr, Cole is in his eighty-fourth 
year and is probably the dean of the photographers of Illinois. 



PREFACE. 

This memorial was prepared and delivered at 
the City of Pekin, February 12, 1909, on the oc- 
casion of the one hundredth anniversary of the 
birth of Abraham Lincoln, celebrated by Joe Hanna 
Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. It was 
then substantially in its present form. Its prepara- 
tion and delivery was a labor of love, expended for 
those who love Liberty. In this crisis of the world's 
history, this awful cataclysm between autocratic 
power and democracy, it is rededicated by its author, 
gladly and freely to that Christian statesman of the 
Kingdom, John R. Mott, and the war work council 
of the Young Men's Christian Association, who are 
so bravely and valiantly carrying the work of the 
Good Samaritan beneath the smoke of battle, in 
the trenches and on the shining decks of the navies 
of the world, with the hope that this little book may 
go wherever the red triangle goes, and that the 
spirit of the Great Emancipator may help a little 
to make the world safer for the lovers of liberty. 
Sincerely, 
WILLIAM REID CURRAN. 

Pekin, Illinois, November 26, 1917. 



4 



^brafjam ilintoln 

A MEMORIAL 



In the morning of time it was written: 

"He stretcheth out the North 

over empty space, 
And hangeth the earth upon 

nothing." 

* * * * * * 

"He putteth forth his hand upon 

the flinty rock; 
He overturneth the mountains 

by the roots. 
He cutteth out channels among the 

rocks, 
And his eye seeth every precious 

thing." 

This is a great truth uttered by the voice 
of the primitive children of men. When we 
look; we see the same truth, written in the 
earth, upon the flinty rock, among the roots 
of the overturned mountains, in the channels 
cut in the rocks and in the many waters of the 
earth; we see and know the truth that there 
is no precious thing but by the finger of God. 



8 Abraham Lincoln 

In the mountain fastness of the Sierras, on 
the western slope of this virgin continent, in a 
canyon of a tributary of the mighty Columbia, 
where it rolls to the sea, is a great medallion, 
in the side of the mountain, high above the 
rushing waters; cut in the flinty rock where 
the mountains were uprooted, chiseled in the 
channels among the rocks; as the ages have 
passed by, the frost of winter and the heat of 
summer, the snow and rain, the earthquake, 
the blasts of the mountain storm, the soft 
breath of spring, the shock of the lightning 
and the gentle touch of the dew; these forces 
have wrought and finished the picture, ages 
before man saw the mountain. 

The medallion is the profile of the great 
Emancipator. It is so life-like and vivid in 
its lines, as to be almost uncanny to the 
beholder. It may be co-incident that in the 
rugged granite are limned on the mountain 
side, the sad and tender image of this Martyr 
of Liberty. That his ideals and personality 
have been engraved on the heart and mind of 



Abraham Lincoln 



the world is not accident. That fact is the 
fulfillment of the law of the spirit. The 
result followed its cause as the fruit follows 
the flower. The image cut in the rocks may 
be an accident wrought by the forces of 
Nature. That men should love liberty and 
love him who died for liberty, is divine. This 
is the precious thing that the eye of Divinity 
beholds in us. The medallion will last as long 
as the mountain. Our love for the man will 
span eternity. The material perishes with 
time. The ideal and spiritual only are eternal. 

"The world will little note nor long remember 
what we say here, but it will never forget what (he) 
did here." 

Greatness was at flood tide in the year 
1809; the world was then blessed in the birth 
of genius, in the realm of literature, invention, 
music, science and state craft. In that year 
occurred the birth of Edgar Allen Poe, Oliver 
Wendell Holmes and Alfred Tennyson, all 
famous in letters; of Cyrus H. McCormick, 
whose invention of the reaper was the first 



10 Abraham Lincoln 

real advance upon the reaping hook, used by 
Ruth in the fields of Boaz; of Mendelssohn 
and Chopin, who challenged the admiration of 
the world in creative harmony; of Charles R. 
Darwin, who made mankind debtor to him in 
fields of unexplored science; of William Ewart 
Gladstone, who was a collossal figure in the 
government of Europe; of Abraham Lincoln 
who dominated the state craft of the western 
hemisphere, preserved the Union, and made 
millions of serfs free men. 

It was a great year in a great century of 
the evolution of democracy. In the sense 
here used democracy is defined, by one who 
is an advanced and clear thinker, on the 
subject to be "A social institution or state 
made up of individuals whose actuating prin- 
ciples of life is this: that they will have no- 
thing, will accept nothing, but what every 
other individual in the whole compact shall 
be entitled to have — exactly the same thing 
on exactly the same terms; and whose united 
effort shall be to establish such ways and 



Abraham Lincoln 11 

means as shall make the working principle 
of each individual actualized in all the out- 
workings of the State as a whole." 

This is an epoch-making idea. A man of 
genius imbued with this ideal is destined to 
be an epoch maker. His life is a menace to 
the special privilege of one individual over 
another, and the dominant right of one man 
over his fellowmen. The vested rights of 
the few, to the exclusion of the many on like 
terms, are a stench in his nostrils and the 
fact that he lives, makes battle a certainty. 
The life of such a man must make history. 
The chapters of its story will be of progress 
toward the realization of the dominant ideal. 
To him the plan of progress is: 

"Where the vanguard camps today, 
The rear shall rest to-morrow." 

Abraham Lincoln, born in the wilderness, 
rocked in the cradle of poverty, fed on the 
bread of bitterness, taught in the wisdom of 
the clods of the valley and the stars of the 



12 Abraham Lincoln 

heavens, was an heir to this ideal, and these 
conditions. 

He stood alone, a product of the evolution 
of democracy; in characteristics without a 
predecessor, without a fellow, and without a 
successor. 

"Nature, they say, doth dote. 
And cannot make a man 

Save on some worn-out plan. 
Repeating us by rote. 
For him, her Old- World moulds aside she threw, 
And choosing sweet clay from the breast 

Of the unexhausted west 
With stuff untainted, shaped a hero new. 
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true." 

The mettle of the blue-grass pastures of 
Kentucky gave him birth; but the sheltering 
woods of Indiana and the blooming prairies 
of Illinois, developed and matured him to the 
flower and fruitage of his great manhood. 

He was born a plebian and was glad of it 
when he said, "God must have liked common 
people, for He made so many of them." The 
common people liked him and heard him 



Abraham Lincoln 13 

gladly. He always was and now is numbered 
among them; reared in the wilderness, the 
child of the frontier of a new civilization, free 
from traditions and conventionalities, un- 
influenced by the schools, and not enervated 
by the fevered ideals of the older civilizations; 
it was not necessary for this man, to serve 
a Midian probation to make him a great 
leader of his people. 

The foot-hills are not the proper point 
of vantage from which to view the mountains* 
grandeur; only distance lends the angle of 
vision wide enough to comprehend the im- 
pressive magnitude and beauty of God's 
great handiwork. The lines are long, rugged, 
angular, rough and severe in a close view; 
but how harmonious, strong, graceful and 
full of beauty they are in the view from the 
distant plain! As wide space is necessary to 
see the mountains' beauty, so distance, in 
time, is required to study the character of 
this great man and learn his strength and 
grandeur. 



14 Abraham Lincoln 

But little more than fifty years have passed 
since this man fell by the blow of an assassin 
induced by hate. His short public life in the 
eye of the nation was lived amid the roar of 
cannon, the clash of musketry, the shock of 
battle, the curses of defeat and the shouts of 
victory; but only now, are we come to the 
stillness after the storm, when we can com- 
mence to know him and appreciate the grandeur 
of his character and worth, uninfluenced by 
passion and hate or partial pride. While he 
wrought, he was refined by the white heat of 
the fierce fires that burned in the crucible of 
sectional hate. Fires that reduced the senate 
of the nation from the high level of dignified 
and orderly discussion to a scene of physical 
violence that spent its final force in the fierce 
conflict of neighbor against neighbor, brother 
against brother, and state against state. 
Amid it all, his heart was not corroded by 
hatred or a wish for vengeance. With more 
military power than Caesar, he was a minister 
of mercy. At Appomattox he received by 



Abraham Lincoln 15 

the hand of his commander in the field, the 
surrender of one of the greatest military 
leaders of his century. At Richmond, by his 
own hand, he ministered to the necessities 
of the victims of the lost cause. 

As a member of Congress he ridiculed his 
military prowess. As President ofjthe Repub- 
lic, he was Commander-in-Chief of the 
mightiest armies of modern times. He used 
those forces, not for conquest of alien terri- 
tory or the military glory of the Commander- 
in-Chief. No battle was fought, or victory 
won, except to preserve the integrity of the 
Union. 

Amid the cares of the nation and the march- 
ing of its batallions, the coming and going of 
captains, he was not too much engrossed to 
write, or talk to the widow, pardon her son, 
for military offense or confer with the private 
soldier about his pension. The stars of the 
night were his watchmen, as he went, from 
tent to tent ministering to the wants of the 
sick and wounded after the battles. It was 



16 AbrahamLincoln 

the irony of fate, that this man's life should 
be so misunderstood that an enemy should 
kill him as a tyrant. 

His death by violence was not an accident, 
or a decree of arbitrary providence. "He 
lived as he did, and died as he did, because 
he was what he was." His character placed 
him in the path of the destroyer. His life 
was the exponent of freedom for all men. The 
hand that struck him down was the representa- 
tive of the Master of serfs. The blow was 
struck by stealth, because it came from the 
power of darkness, and "darkness compre- 
hended not the light." 

His was the crown of modesty. Through- 
out his life, he had sacrificed self that others 
might wear the laurel of victory. Among 
the leaders of the bar of his state, he con- 
sidered his fellows better lawyers than him- 
self. When called to the presidency of the 
Republic at the age of fifty-two, he came with- 
out training in national affairs, and without 
experience of any sort to fit him for the great 



Mbraham Lincoln 17 



duties thdit devolved upon him, except his 
training as a lawyer. Mr. Lincoln was not 
trained as a logician and a lawyer in the 
schools. He was the product of frontier con- 
ditions. The University of Hard Knocks was 
his alma mater. He was in a large measure, 
self-taught in his profession. The old Eighth 
Judicial Circuit of Illinois was the scene of 
his professional activities. The bar of Illi- 
nois in his day in that circuit was the peer 
of any bar in the Nation. Illinois was then 
in the formative period of the development 
of the law. It produced a President of the 
United States, a Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, members of the 
United States Senate of dominant force and 
leadership, congressmen of national reputa- 
tion and governors of this state, who laid 
deep and wide its executive foundations and 
policies. In its courts, he met and practiced 
with such men as Davis, Edwards, Stewart, 
Fickland, Browning, Williams, Logan, Purple, 
Manning, Merriman, Dicky, Douglas, Baker, 



18 Abraham Lincoln 

Ford, Palmer, Yates, Oglesby, McDougal, 
Sweat, Wilson, Trumble, Wead, Prettyman, 
and a long list, fast fading from memory and 
love of all who knew them; for the name and 
fame of the lawyer, who has not military or 
political prominence are written on the sands 
of time and the waves of a new generation 
soon wash them into oblivion. The world knew, 
while he was at the Bar, that he was a great 
advocate. It is but now learning, from the 
records of the courts, that he was a lawyer of 
wide learning and accurate knowledge. Cases 
like Bailey against Cromwell and "The Effie 
Af ten" case established beyond question, that he 
not only was a good lawyer, but a very great 
lawyer. At the threshhold of his administra- 
tion lurked armed rebellion with the firm 
resolution to dismember the Union. He was 
doubtful of his ability to perform the great 
task that rested upon him, "greater than that 
which rested upon Washington." His country- 
men were apprehensive. Continental Eurpoe 
prophesied failure and the end of the republic 
seemed imminent. 



Abraham Lincoln 19 

Abraham Lincoln was chosen president, 
not because of his personality or availability, 
but on account of the ideals that he represent- 
ed. The issue was clearly joined and freedom 
won the ballot, though in the minority. Not 
all the miraculous victories of the few over 
the many, and the weak over the strong are 
written in ancient Hebrew history. 

It was not in the great debates of 1858 
alone, that the ideals of Lincoln became 
known to his countrymen; they were first 
stated in Peoria, in reply to his great antagon- 
ist, on October 16, 1854. It was on this day, 
and at this place that the great Emancipator 
set his face toward the presidency and martyr- 
dom. 

In that great address, speaking of slavery, 
he said: 

"I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of 
slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our 
republican example of its just influence in the world; 
enables the enemies of free institutions with plausi- 
bility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real 
friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and 



20 Abraham Lincoln 

especially because it forces so many good men among 
ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental 
principles of civil liberty, criticising the declaration 
of independence and insisting that there is no right 
principal of action but self interest." 

* * * * * * 

"What I do say is, that no man is good enough 
to govern another man without that others consent. 
I say this is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor 
of American Republicanism. 

"But Nebraska is urged as a great Union saving 
measure. Well, I too, go for saving the Union. 
Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the 
extension of it, rather than see the Union dissolved; 
just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a 

greater one." 

* * * * * * 

"Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's 
nature. Opposition to it is his love of justice. 
These principles are an eternal antagonism and when 
brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension 
brings them shocks and throes and convulsions 
must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Com- 
promise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declara- 
tion of Independence; repeal all past history;:you 
still cannot repeal human nature." 



Abraham Lincoln 21 



On the 15th of August, 1855, in a private 
letter to a personal friend, he wrote: 

"Our political problem now is, can we as a nation, 
continue together permanently — forever — half slave 
and half free? The problem is too mighty for me— 
May God, in His mercy, superintend the solution." 

This was a long time prior to his announce- 
ment that a house divided against itself 
cannot stand. 

At Independence Hall, on his way to 
Washington to his inauguration with the 
threat and m.enace of assassination hovering 
over him, in closing his address, he said : 

"But I have said nothing but what I am willing 
to live by and if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, 
to die by." 

In August, 1862, amid the darkness, doubt 
and censure of friend and foe, he wrote: 

"If there be those who would not save the Union 
unless they could at the same time save slavery, I 
do not agree with them. If there be those who would 
not save the Union unless they could at the same 
time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My 



22 Abraham Lincoln 

paramount object in this struggle is to save the 
Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. 
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, 
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all 
the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by 
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also 
do that. What I do about slavery and the colored 
race, I do because I believe it helps to save the 
Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do 
not believe it would help save the Union." 

With him, integrity and a fixed purpose 
were matters of principle and not of pro- 
clamation. He was chosen president as a 
radical, but in his administration, he had the 
unstinted censure of both radicals and con- 
servatives. His heart was tender and pliable 
as a child's in matters of mercy. Neither 
the threats of one faction or cajolery of the 
other moved him an iota from his fixed pur- 
pose. His paramount purpose was to prevent 
the extension of slavery and ultimately to 
abolish it. His mind grasped the fundamental 
truth that the Union must be preserved to 
assure liberty to the white man as well as 



Abraham Lincoln 23 



the black man. That freedom to the slave 
without the Union would be a curse to both 
the slave and master; that the one without 
the other would be but an apple of the dead 
sea, that would wither to ashes in the hand 
that plucked it. 

No act of his and no word reveals an 
uncertain moment in this matter. His mind 
was fixed on it, and there was no variableness 
or shadow made by turning. 

At his first inaugural, speaking to the 
nation, his closing words were: 

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-country- 
men, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of 
civil war. The government will not assail you. 
You can have no conflict without being yourselves 
the aggressors. You have no oath registered in 
Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall 
have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and 
defend it. I am loath to close. We are not enemies, 
but friends. We must not be enemies. Though 
passion may have strained, it must not break our 
bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, 
stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave 



24 Abraham Lincoln 

to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this 
broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, 
when again touched, as surely they will be by the 
better angels of our nature." 

Here the statesman rose almost to the 
altitude of a prophet. 

While these words were being uttered 
from the steps of the Capitol, secession was 
looking him in the face and whetting its 
sword for the fray. His matchless strategy 
put the government in the right and its 
enemies in the wrong. He waited until 
slavery attacked the Union. In repelling 
that attack, his great opportunity came. The 
Union was saved and slavery was destroyed 
at one blow. Slavery brought on the war 
and was devoured by the dogs of war that it 
loosed from their leash. 

Lincoln was a great leader of men and a 
leader of great men. His choice of a cabinet 
put him in the front rank. He chose as his 
constitutional advisors those who had been 
candidates against him in the national con- 



Abraham Lincoln 25 

vention, on the theory that they would be 
of more service to the nation and less detri- 
mental to his administration in the cabinet 
than out of it. He was expected to be the 
tool of his cabinet. There was rivalry to 
determine who should dominate him. His 
matchless tact neutralized the idea. The 
members of his political family soon learned 
that his was the dominant mind of the ad- 
ministration. 

Emancipation was considered long before 
the event. The radicals urged it, and the 
conservaties derided it. Its friends censured 
him as vascillating, its enemies as a tyrant, 
if he attempted it. With patience borne of 
his great soul and the grace of God, this lone 
man of the west wrestled with the problem. 
With the draft of the great document in his 
desk, ready for signature, week after week he 
met delegations of strong men, who came to 
urge such a measure. He argued against it 
with such a vigor, to get the benefit of their 
arguments for it, that the Nation was con- 



26 Abraham Lincoln 

vinced that he never would do it. He let 
the delegations come and go, day after day, 
without a hint of what he intended to do; 
while he waited for a victory to give the 
proclamation force. 

When the time came, he told the cabinet, 
what he was going to do. He told them that 
he had promised his God that he would do it. 
He said he would accept suggestions from them 
as to the form of the document, but not as to 
the advisability of the act. He said the 
responsibility was his. In the Nation's throes 
of dissolution, he issued the proclamation as 
a war measure to save the Union. This is 
the crowning act of his great life and because 
of it, the laurel of the victor's crown rests 
upon his brow, and his name is today hailed 
by the glad acclaim of the world's millions, 
who love liberty. Between the proclamation 
and the fall of the confederacy was the dark- 
ness before the dawn. Into it, the Nation 
and its great leader went under the pall and 
shadow of death and the flower of the sons of 



Abraham Lincoln 27 



the North and the flower of the sons of the 
South were the sacrifice, before the dawning. 
The fixed purpose and loving heart of this 
great man are finally revealed in the closing 
sentences of his second inaugural. This is 
almost his last public utterance to the Nation: 

"Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — 
that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass 
away. Yet, if God wills that it continues until 
all wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and 
fifty years of unrequitted toil shall be sunk, and until 
every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid 
by another drawn with the sword, as was said three 
thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The 
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous al- 
together.' 

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; 
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the 
right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; 
to bind up the Nation's wounds; to care for him 
who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow — 
and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and 
cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, 
and with all nations." 

No more exalted utterance than this has 



28 Abraham Lincoln 

been made by the tongue of man since the 
Gallilean uttered the beatitudes at the Horns 
of Hattin. 

Those who attempt to account for Abra- 
ham Lincoln are met by many contradictions. 
They assume that his character was simple, 
easily understood, and that he took all men 
into his confidence. They are surprised to 
find that he was complex in character, his 
life misunderstood, and that he probably 
never took any one man into his entire con- 
fidence. It has been supposed that he was 
without ambition; yet without ambition he 
never would have been President of the 
Republic. He was censured for too much 
levity and not deep enough of mind to com- 
prehend the gravity of the Nation's woes; 
yet we know that his smiles and wit covered 
a breaking heart while he trod the wine press 
in misery; his face wreathed in laughter, his 
heart melted in tears. He patiently bore the 
reputation of a cruel tyrant; while he was in 
the gall of bitterness, in sympathy for all who 



Abraham Lincoln 29 

suffered. He was great enough to bear the 
stigma of a weakling at the hands of his 
friends while he waited to show them that he 
was strong enough to lead the Nation to 
salvation. 

The son of a Father and a Mother, v/ho 
could not write and without a liberal educa- 
tion, he was one of the matchless masters of 
the English tongue. Untaught by the teach- 
ers of logic, he was easily the greatest political 
logician of his age. Without the aid of the 
teachers of oratory, he was among the greatest 
political controvertionalists of his time. With 
few of the graces of the orator, he delivered 
the most notable orations of his century. 
With the reputation of a rebel against God, 
he passed across the stage of action, like one 
of the patriarchs of old, knowing that "The 
just shall live by faith" God-fearing and 
God-led. 



30 Abraham Lincoln 

"Here was a type of the true elder race. 
And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to 

face." 

* * * * * * 

"He knew to bide his time. 

And can his fame abide 
Still patient in his simple faith sublime, 

Till the wise years decide. 
Great captains, with their guns and drums, 

Disturb our judgment for the hour, 

But at last silence comes; 
These are all gone, and, standing like a tower. 
Our children shall behold his fame, 

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man. 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 

New birth of our new soil, the first American." 



